


Exchange the Experience

by sariagray



Category: Torchwood
Genre: Death/Torture (Non-Explicit), Explicit Language, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-29
Updated: 2012-03-29
Packaged: 2017-11-02 16:11:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,465
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/370890
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sariagray/pseuds/sariagray
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jack finds a device he hasn’t seen since he was in the Time Agency; Ianto finds a way to use it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Exchange the Experience

**Author's Note:**

> Beta'd by analineblue. Spans pre-Torchwood through post-Exit Wounds. Title and lyrics come from “Running Up That Hill,” originally by Kate Bush, and covered by many. Versions by Kate Bush, Placebo, and Track and Field inspired this.

_It doesn't hurt me.  
Do you want to feel how it feels?   
Do you want to know, know that it doesn't hurt me?_

 

The 41st Century, known to the history feeds as _The Hundred Years of Peace_ , was fucking boring. The small outpost where he had been stationed saw little and the turns of his assignment wore on. About a click ago, there had been a minor disturbance and he’d had to call it into Base A16, but that was about the only action in the past few rotations. And it had been a fluke. Just a minor anomaly that had amounted to nothing. 

He checked the long range scanners for the thousandth time that morning and leaned back in his seat, his leg shake-tapping against the metal floor. It echoed until Hel shot him a look and he stilled.

“Restless?”

“Hmm.”

“Why don’t you go clean the control room then?”

He sighed and got up. Hel was a good two ranks beneath him, but the man had earned both this restful assignment and the respect of the small team. Besides, the control room didn’t need much cleaning out unless Jar’la had come back early from her sweep. The woman was an unrepentant slob.

There were only ninety turns left of this, and then he’d be advanced to Information Extraction Training. It was a prestigious position.

He tidied up the ration wrappers and the pieces of hardware that Jar’la seemed to leave everywhere. So she was back early. He was tempted to toss them in the incinerator with the wrappers, but she knew seven different ways to kill a man with her bare hands, so he refrained. 

Back when he was a child, back before his world went to shit and he’d found himself without family or home, he’d wanted to be a healer. He liked the idea of caring for people, of making them better and whole. The colony needed good healers, especially after an attack. Healing was good, respectable, positive work and he’d had a knack for it. He got a good deal of practice in with Gray, bandaging scraped knees and even setting a broken arm once. _Gray_. He bit the inside of his cheek. He’d searched for Gray for years, with all of the haphazard vigor of youth, before realizing that he’d need actual skills if he planned to be successful. Meanwhile, Gray was still out there. Somewhere. Alone.

“This place is so fucking backwards,” Jar’la announced, stomping into the room in the midst of a fit. “How long we got, boss?”

“Two rotations.”

“Fuck.” She flopped into the command chair and closed her eyes.

“You’ve still got a click of leave if you want to take it. It’s not like we’re swamped at the moment.”

“Nah, saving it up for the assignment on Outpost Eta. That place is going to be torture.”

He winced at her choice of word and dropped her bits of hardware into a box. “23rd Century?”

“It was, but they moved it to the 20th. Disgusting. Where you heading after this?”

“IE Training.”

“Shit.” She stood up and grabbed a container of water from the cooler. “That’s heavy. How long?”

“Six months.” 

He sat in her vacated seat and typed a few commands into the system. Nothing. He checked his vortex manipulator for temporal activity just to be sure, though he didn’t need to. It was _always_ nothing in this place.

“And then?”

“Working with the core team in Central.”

“Must’ve needed you on the fast track then.”

He nodded, even though he was the one who had pushed for it. Conceptually, the agency’s methods repulsed him and went against everything he’d been taught out on his home world, but the skills would prove useful in his search for Gray. The access to certain tools wouldn’t hurt, either. The Time Agency had things that could loosen anyone’s tongue, technology that could rip through a creature’s mind, making them writhe in agony until they spilled all of their secrets. He knew it was available; he’d seen it used before by commanders and interrogators. And that was the only reason he’d signed up. Well, that and having no other ready options, of course.

“Going up in a bit,” Jar’la said after checking the flags for any messages. “Want me to shut her down?” She nodded to the control panel.

“Go on ahead. I’ll do it.”

*********

The light flickered and Jack reached over Ianto to turn it off. The bead chain jangled against the frosted glass shade as it swung to and fro, the only sound in the bunker other than their mismatched breathing and the distant clanking of pipes.

In the new dark, Ianto traced a strange, hesitant pattern on Jack’s chest with the side of his thumb. Jack could feel the rough bump of a callus that, as Ianto had once informed him, came from the constant flicking of a lighter. It hadn’t gone away even a year after Ianto had quit smoking. Although sometimes Jack wondered if Ianto had _actually_ quit or if he clung to hiding the habit out of a pathological need to keep secrets. 

“What’s it like?” Ianto asked quietly.

“Hmm?”

“Dying. Coming back.”

The pressure of Ianto’s thumb against his skin increased, as though Jack’s own secrets were written across his flesh in Braille.

“There’s just darkness, emptin –”

“What does it _feel_ like?” 

Jack sighed. “A gunshot feels like a gunshot. Drowning feels like drowning. Stabbing feels like stabbing.”

“And when you come back?” Ianto’s hand flattened against Jack’s chest, a cage for his stuttering heart. “What’s that like?”

There was a long pause, and both of their breaths seemed suspended so that Jack fancied he could hear the ticking of his pocket watch all the way across the room, even though it was buried in blue cotton and wool. 

“It hurts,” Jack said after a moment, “like breathing fiberglass and razorblades. But it passes quickly. It’s the terror that stays.”

Ianto didn’t say a word and Jack tensed at the silence. Then Ianto tightened his flat hand into a fist, into a soldier’s pledge of fidelity or a sign of protection, and Jack relaxed.

*********

Jack set the device down on the middle of the conference table and took his seat. The piece of tech was shaped like a flat hourglass and was constructed of some deep grey, almost black, matte metal with decorative chrome etching that warmed when he touched it. On each end was a curved handle done in gold. His team stared at it, bleary-eyed from focusing on computer screens for the past five hours trying to track this _thing’s_ arrival through the Rift, and sipped at their coffees.

“Okay,” Gwen said, setting down her mug. “I’ll bite. What is it?”

“It’s a third model Telalgia.” Jack leaned back in his seat. It creaked. He smiled. “Seems to be in working order, too, though it still needs to be tested.”

“And what is a third model Telalgia?”

Jack grinned. “There was a small but popular boutique corporation, established in the mid 48th century, called PsyChic. Parapsychology was making waves and the science was there, so they specialized in little devices for the upper middleclass.”

“That could get ugly,” Owen muttered.

“Oh, it wasn’t too bad. These weren’t advanced. Little things, like buttons that let you know what your significant other wanted, or special pens that could help you cheat on an exam, that sort of thing. It was pretty common then.”

“So,” Gwen said with a smirk, “that’s what this is?”

“Not quite. In the early 49th, their Research and Development team stumbled upon a compound that would increase pain-based telepathy. Essentially, it would form a pathway between two individuals’ pain receptors. They worked with a team of doctors and patented it for medical use. You go to your physician, hook up with this device, and your doctor can make a more accurate diagnosis.”

Owen gave a low whistle. “So, I take this, grab one end while one of you grabs the other, and I know exactly what you’re feeling physically?”

“Got it in one,” Jack said.

He glanced around the table. Toshiko was staring at the device while fiddling with her PDA, her hair falling in her face. He knew it wouldn’t be more than an hour before she was begging to put it through a battery of tests. Owen, too, would certainly want a long go at it. And Gwen glowed with barely contained excitement. Ianto chewed on his bottom lip and shifted focus from the device to Jack and then back again.

“But,” he continued, “by the time I was born, it had been banned. While the device itself was sound, the technology behind it was corrupted. By the early 50th century, terrorist groups and other organizations were using it as a torture device.” 

_Like the Time Agency_ , he thought. Even his inner voice was bitter.

Gwen frowned. “And how would that work? You’d have to hurt yourself to hurt someone else.”

“Think about it. You get someone with a lot of information that your group needs and then you get someone else, nobody important. You hook them both up and torture the person who doesn’t matter, torture them however you want, until they die. Then you bring someone else in. And another person. Meanwhile, the person with information gets all of the agony and none of the physical damage. You could take years, if you wanted, and you wouldn’t have to worry about being careful. All of the other deaths would be nothing but collateral damage.”

Gwen winced and Jack tried not to follow suit as old memories began to surface. He swallowed hard and took a gulp of his coffee. There were piles of innocent bodies that he was still trying to atone for. 

“For that to work,” Ianto said softly, “the technology would have to be in a different medium.”

Jack nodded and smiled. “By that time, they’d progressed to putting it in necklaces, pins, rings, shackles, all sorts of things so long as the right ore was used and the configurations were accurate.”

Biting into a biscuit, Owen gestured around the table. “Right,” he said, mouth half full. “But can I use it?”

“Why?”

“Well, Gwen here’s got a pain threshold that makes me cringe, and I don’t think Ianto’d admit if his bloody leg got cut off. It’d cut down triage time.”

“And it would probably knock you unconscious,” Jack said, shaking his head. “This was made for individuals with proper psychic training. No, it goes into the secure archives after it’s been tested and catalogued.” He nodded once at Ianto. “End of discussion.”

*********

He looked up just in time to catch Ianto hovering in his doorway for the customary few seconds before walking in. Gwen had been sent home over an hour ago to seek comfort from her husband; the rift had been quiet all day and it looked like it might continue its streak of sympathetic benevolence for the rest of the week.

“UNIT’s willing to send temporary backup if we need it, though they couldn’t promise Martha,” Ianto announced and leaned against Jack’s desk.

Jack snorted. “Of course not.”

“I,” Ianto cleared his throat, “I have something for you.”

Jack raised an eyebrow. “Oh? What’s the occasion?”

Shrugging, Ianto pulled out a small burgundy box. It looked to have seen better days, aged and rubbed almost translucent smooth in some places. “I was just thinking, with everything…well. I thought you should have these. Someone should, anyway, and –”

“Ianto,” Jack said.

“Just open the box.” 

Jack looked skeptical, but he did as he was told. Nestled against a bit of old velvet was a pair of chrome cufflinks, square shaped and plain with a matte black face.

“They were my father’s,” Ianto said quietly. “After he died, they came to me. And when I die, they’ll go into storage. I – I didn’t want that to happen.”

Jack felt something in him snap and he grabbed Ianto’s hand tight, foolishly hoping that the simple gesture would anchor him to Earth just a little longer. He was tempted to say things like ‘You’re not going to die,’ or ‘You have decades left,’ but they were mostly past the lying. At least, blatantly. At least, about the important things.

“I’ll take care of them,” he said instead, and refused to let go.

*********

As always, Jack is disoriented when he comes to. He feels the pain ebb away and takes cautious stock. It is night and the ground is wet. His face is damp, too, with the mist that surrounds him. He struggles to sit up. There is the unmistakable rank scent of weevil and the memory suddenly comes rushing back. He rubs a hand over his stomach, feeling sticky, torn cloth and unblemished skin, as he looks around quickly for Ianto.

To his left is the weevil he’d shot point blank just as it tore into him. He remembers Ianto’s shout and looks to his right.

There, on the ground, Ianto lies in a heap. Jack scrambles over, his mind racing. The weevil had been shot dead and Ianto had been standing, not crumpled and pale, when Jack had died. He feels for a pulse, which is breathtakingly steady. And he is warm. Beautifully warm. Not dead, just unconscious. He maneuvers himself around to shift Ianto, but his own body is still too weak to be of much use. He hs Ianto’s upper body off the ground and rests it against his own chest.

He reaches to grab Ianto’s hand, to hold it tight, and as he does a bit of chrome at Ianto’s wrist catches the light from the streetlamp overhead. He runs his forefinger over the matte grey-black square of Ianto’s cufflinks and then hazards a glance at the matching pair on his own shirt.

The deep black is familiar and seems to suck up all of the light around it. He hadn’t looked into the secure archives in months. He hadn’t felt the need to. He wondered when Ianto had taken it, how long he had worked, how many nights of “I just want to go home and _sleep_ , Jack” had been a simple, lovely ruse as he worked with the alloy. Jack thinks that he would be impressed with Ianto’s ingenuity if he wasn’t so terrified.

Slowly (he’s shocked and yet not at all surprised), he grasps both of Ianto’s hands. It’s awkward in their current position, but he doesn’t care. He squeezes them and his fingertip catches on the small callus of Ianto’s thumb.

“Fucking idiot.”

He stares at the brick wall across the alley and doesn’t move.

 

_You don't want to hurt me,  
But see how deep the bullet lies.   
Unaware, I'm tearing you asunder._


End file.
